Finally, a bit of this debate that I can comment on! Have been reading the many (many) threads on this subject with some interest. Various Artist/Compilation behaviour is pretty important to me in one sense, because approx 80% of my music are compilation albums (electronic music). However, in another sense (and as a direct result of the type of music I tend to listen to) it's not so relevant, because I don't browse by artist very much at all. Electronic artists often use different names for each release and often list more than one artist, so I think I have about 9,000 tracks and over 11,000 individual artists.
So, what is important to me is the ability to remove those artists from my browse by artist list proper, and the current VA logic works well for that for my personal situation. If the logic were to be changed I would very much want the COMPILATION tag to work as it does now, by overriding the VA logic and forcing an album to be listed under "various artists" (which in my set up is renamed "Compilations"). At a more general level, I think this is a good debate to be having - although I remain to be convinced that major changes are needed to the current logic. What strikes me from the last few posts is that it is reasonably clear that people have different ways of managing and sorting their music. Mr Sinatra in particular thinks that his/her way is closer to the default behaviour that the average user will expect (and may well be right about that). Classical music is a completely different issue which doesn't even come into play in some of the proposals, and has very different requirements. Whilst I welcome the suggestion to clarify and fix default behaviour, the thing that Slim does very well is keep the option for users to customise their experience by adding tagging/sorting options. To that extent, I don't quite follow the "why should I have to add a specific tag to get the behaviour I am asking for?" (this is very much paraphrasing, and not aimed at anyone in particular). Surely there are three questions here: *1) what is the right behaviour for SC to have as default behaviour?* As I said above, I think the artist logic works quite well, but that may well be because I have lots of albums with many different artists on them, and only one or two albums with a main artist but some guest artists (which I resolved by setting an explicit "Compilation=0" tag. I can see the issues which others have raised with their particular music collections and think it's a valid discussion whose libraries are closer to the "average" - I suspect it's not me. *2) is is possible to achieve the sorting options the various posters on this thread have requested by amending the tagging or sorting options?* If so, can these operations be done simply and easily or do they require very time intensive work? If not, is this an option that SC should really be looking to support either as default or via an option for the users who want it? *3) If the requested sort cannot be achieved, what changes would be required to meet this concern and how easy are they to implement?* My experience of floating around these boards for a while suggests that, where VA logic is concerned, small changes can have massive, unexpected impact on a whole section of users who don't post on these boards often and who aren't vocal about their needs until something gets "broken" from their perspective. There was a massive issue in the move from 6.4 to 6.5 where something changed in the VA logic (possibly having to put your VA artist tracks in a single folder) - and there were many many posts complaining about a small change (to some) which turned into a big issue for others. [Happy to be corrected on which version change this was]. An I very much like having Compilations at the top of the list, because it is such a distinct section of my music - again that is very probably unique to me or people with libraries like me. -- Siduhe ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Siduhe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=723 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47297 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
